Attribution is the work of tying a job back to whatever produced it.
It matters because the alternative is the oldest problem in advertising: you know roughly half of it is working, and you cannot tell which half. Without attribution, the honest answer to "should I spend more on this?" is a guess, and the guess is usually made from whichever number is easiest to see.
Why it is hard
The click and the job are separated by everything that makes a service business a service business. Somebody sees an advertisement on a phone, does nothing, calls two days later from a different number, books an appointment for the following week, and pays a month after that.
By the time money changes hands, four systems hold four pieces of it, and none of them can see the others.
What Omnyra does
When a job appears, Omnyra looks for an advertising click from the same visitor within the hour before it and links the two.
Each link carries a confidence, because certainty here would be a lie:
- High — exactly one candidate click. The connection is as good as this gets.
- Medium — a few candidates, and the closest in time is taken.
- Low — many candidates, so the link is weak and should be read as a hint.
Confidence is shown rather than hidden. A number presented as certain when it is a coin-flip is worse than no number, because it gets acted on.
The source recorded on the customer
The other path is simpler and, for most businesses, larger. When your office books a customer and records where they came from — Angi, Thumbtack, a referral, the website — that lead source comes across with the customer and is used as attribution directly. No click needs to exist.
This is how lead-generation marketplaces get counted at all. A lead bought from a marketplace never produces a click on your own advertising, so click-matching cannot see it; the source your office typed is the only record that it happened.
Two things follow. The first is that the discipline of recording a source at booking is what makes the whole picture work, and it costs a few seconds per customer. The second is that a customer recorded with no source is not attributed to anything and is not guessed at — it goes to unattributed rather than being spread across the sources that are there.
Sources are read as your office typed them, so "Angie's List", "Angi" and "angi" are three sources until they are spelled the same way. Consistent naming at the point of entry is worth more here than anything that can be done afterwards.
Calls
Phone calls are the hardest case and the most common one, which is why call tracking exists. A separate tracked number per advertisement is the only reliable way to know which one produced the ring.
Feeding results back
Where it is enabled, completed jobs are reported back to Google Ads. This is not reporting for its own sake: it lets Google's bidding optimize toward customers who actually paid rather than toward people who filled in a form. It is usually the single highest-return change available to a small advertiser.
What it will never do
Attribution cannot see word of mouth, the van in the driveway, or the customer who remembered you from three years ago. Those are frequently the largest sources of work in a service business and they leave no trace.
Read attribution as "of the work I can trace, here is what produced it", never as a complete picture of where customers come from. Businesses that forget the caveat cut the marketing that was quietly working.
The one lever on that is the source field at booking, which is the only place word of mouth can be captured. A referral is invisible to every automatic method and obvious to whoever answered the phone.